PC build help - Windows boot

RedRabbit

Have you tried burning a fresh disc.  It could be something as daft as bad copy.

Other than that definitely try the bootable USB.

roundthebend

RedRabbit said:

Have you tried burning a fresh disc.  It could be something as daft as bad copy.

Other than that definitely try the bootable USB.

Yep, tried a fresh disc. The odd thing is that both looked OK, but the first one didn't get recognised as a boot disc, whereas the 2nd one did. So, it leads me to believe that the burning isn't working correctly.

But, I think I might have managed to get it sorted to a USB memory stick. The Windows tool that @holnrew linked to wasn't playing ball so I'm trying ISOtoUSB.com which is, at least, pretending to be creating a bootable USB. We'll see.

Cacofonix

Try reseating the memory.

roundthebend

Cacofonix said:

Try reseating the memory.

Will do.

roundthebend

Hurrah, success.
It seems that PowerISO only allows 300MB files to be burned in the trial version. But it doesn't tell you that when you try to burn a bigger image, it just pretends like everything is OK.
Anyway, I got the ISO onto a USB stick and it is all up and running.
Phew! I might even so this again in future.

RedRabbit

Glad you've got it working.

Not much help now but Windows does have a built in image burning program.  Not sure which version it was introduced in but Windows 7 certainly has it.

roundthebend

RedRabbit said:

Glad you've got it working.

Not much help now but Windows does have a built in image burning program.  Not sure which version it was introduced in but Windows 7 certainly has it.

I think I might have tried it but I've lost track of all the stuff I did try. I even tried a utility from Microsoft specifically designed to burn ISO to DVD but that gave me an error of some sort.

The long and short of it is that I'm really satisfied at how easy the hardware was to plug together, and I've learned how to choose the components to make a decent machine. But I've also realised that certain things that go wrong don't tell you what the problem is so you're left to guess. I'm a software developer and it's one of the most important things I do to make sure that errors are reported in a useful way so that quick and accurate remedy can be applied.

Thanks for all your help folks.